As can easily be seen, our horrifically warm weather continues. It feels like genuine spring. For the past three, maybe even four days, daytime temperatures have risen into the 40's and snow has been melting into slush.
The Iron Dog snowmachine race from here to Nome starts tomorrow. Two years ago, maybe three, I went to Big Lake for start of that race to photograph two competitors who were the nephews of my good friend, Rose Albert.
When I arrived at about 11:00 AM, the temperture was -36.
And now we are having weather in the 40's. Snow is melting. And down in the south, people who don't usually see much snow are getting dumped on and are freezing.
It is not that mid-winter 40's is strikingly unusal. It happens every winter, every now and then, its just that this winter relatively warm air has dominated the entire season. There has been very little cold.
It is El Niño, of course, pulling all that warm air up from the South Pacific, magnified by the Arctic Oscillation which has caused the normal polar low pressure to slip south and thus the Far North, even the Arctic itself, to be much warmer than normal - even than the normal of the past decade, which in itself has been significantly warmer than historical norms.
So - to you folks who jump up and down with glee and point to the snow and cold in Washington, DC and elsewhere as proof that global warming is a made up phenomena and that there is no reason for us to clean up our atmosphere but argue that we should just go on happily polluting so certain people can make big bucks until the Chinese master green technology and become the rulers of the world, I say, broaden your vision.
Look north!
This, by the way, is Ron Mancil.
A couple of weeks ago, I got a Facebook invitation from Ron to become one of his friends. We have been friends for decades, so of course I accepted. He then surprised me by telling me that he was working at the Mahoney Ranch, the place where I sometimes photograph horses on my coffee break, across the street from the tiny Mahoney Graveyard in Grotto Iona.
So, as I drove past on my coffee break, I saw the familiar figure of a man who I had probably not seen for at least a few years walking out of the horse pasture toward a barn. I pulled off the road, into the driveway, got out of the car, we shook hands and he introduced to the dog, whose name I have forgotten.
Ron and I first met nearly 30 years ago, when he came to work as an artist and cartoonist for the Tundra Times, where I got my start in Alaska. Ron is an Arctic Slope Iñupiaq and a greatly talented artist and scupltor. The remnants of many dinosaurs have been found on the Arctic Slope, including in the lands where his grandparents used to hunt and roam, and at times as a student of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Ron has worked with scientists to help uncover and identify those bones.
From time to time, though, the bottle has over-powered him and knocked him off course.
This is what brought him to Mahoney Ranch, where, about six months ago, Pat Mahoney, gave him work and a place to stay.
And all that time, I was regularly passing by, sometimes shooting pictures of the horses from my car, or photographing Grotto Iona and I did not even know he was there.
He has been living sober and dry, and takes courage from the fact that in this valley there are many alcoholics who are living sober, who are encouraging each other to do so.
More than once, things have gone wrong, but that doesn't matter now.
There is but one thing that matters and that is today... today... today...
After Ron and I visited, I got back into the car and headed towards home. Just before I got to the bridge that crosses the Little Su, I saw this man hitchhiking.
I don't normally pick up hitchhikers. I did when I was young. I picked them up all the time. Rarely did I ever pass one. Often times, if their destination lay beyond mine, I would just keep going and take them there. But over time, I heard too many reports of bad things happening to people who picked up hitchhikers, including murder.
I knew a fellow, a Vietnam Veteran, dead now, who was himself hitchhiking on the Parks Highway between here and Fairbanks when someone picked him up but then robbed and beat him, stripped him of his clothing and dumped him in temperatures far below zero and left him to freeze to death.
He did not want to freeze and so he ran and ran and ran until someone came along. He lived but lost much of his feet to frostbite.
So I decided it wasn't worth the risk and stopped picking them up.
Once in awhile, I will still pick up a hitchhiker, when something just tells me that it is absolutely okay and that it would be unnecessarily mean of me just to pass by.
Such was the case here. I figured he could only be a local, living in a cabin or hut without a car and that he just needed to get to the store or something.
Sure enough, that was the case. His name was Clay and he had me drop him off at the new gas station and store at the corner of Church and Seldon.
"I'm sure glad they built this place," he told me. "And I don't mind this weather, either. I just don't want it to rain, that's all. I'd rather it stayed just cold enough to snow, but no colder."
I wanted to give him my blog address so that he could see this, but he has no computer, no internet, and is not tech savvy, save for playing a video game that he told me about.
Baby Jobe is doing well. In the morning, before Kalib goes off to daycare, he reportedly gives his baby brother a mooch and a hug. Considering that he wanted nothing to do with him the last time we saw them together, that is a huge improvement.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 11:55AM 
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